• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction
• Famous-Fiction
• Historical-Fiction

By Root 24529 0

’s class said that Sister Cyrilla used to pound him on the bean with her clapper, and he’d sit there yelling he was going to tell his mother; and it was funny, and all the kids in the room laughed their guts out. They didn’t have ‘em as crazy as Vinc in Studs’ class; but there was TB McCarthy, who was always getting his ears beat off, and being made to kneel up in front of the room, or to go in Sister Bernadette’s room and sit with all the girls and let them laugh at him. And there was Reardon with horses’ hoofs for feet. One day in geography in the fifth grade, Cyrilla called on Reardon and asked him what the British Isles consisted of. Reardon didn’t know so Studs whispered to him to say iron, and Reardon said iron. Sister Cyrilla thought it was so funny she .marked him right for the day’s lesson. And St. Patrick’s meant Weary Reilley, and Studs hated Weary. He didn’t know whether or not he could lick Weary, and Weary was one tough customer, and the guys had been waiting for Studs and Weary to scrap ever since Weary had come to St. Patrick’s in the third grade. Studs was a little leery about mixing it with Reilley... no, he wasn’t... it was just... well, there was no use starting fights unless you had to... and he’d never backed out of a scrap with Weary Reilley or any other guy. And that time he had pasted Weary in the mush with an icy snowball, well, he hadn’t backed out of a fight when Weary started getting sore. He had just not meant to hit Weary with it, and in saying so he had only told the truth.

St. Patrick’s meant a lot of things. St. Patrick’s meant…..Lucy.

Lucy Scanlan would stand on the same stage with him in a few hours, and. she would receive her diploma. She would wear a white dress, just like his sister Frances, and Weary’s sister Fran, and she would receive her diploma. Everybody said that Fran Lonigan and Fran Reilley were the two prettiest girls in the class ell, if you asked him, the prettiest girl in the class was black-bobbed-haired Lucy.

He got soft, and felt like he was all mud and mush inside; held his hand over his heart, and told himself:

My Lucy!

He flicked some ashes in the sink, and said to himself: Lucy, I love you!

Once when he had been in the sixth grade, he had walked home with Lucy. Now, he puffed his cigarette, and the sneer went off his face. He thought of the March day when he had walked home with her. He had walked home with her. All along Indiana Avenue, he had been liking her, wanting to kiss her. Now, he remembered that day as clearly as if it had just happened. He remembered it better than the day when he was just a punk and he had bashed the living moses out of that smoke who pulled a razor on him over in Carter Playground, and a gang of guys had carried him around on their shoulders, telling him what a great guy he was, and how, when he grew up, he would become the white hope of the world, and lick Jack Johnson for the heavyweight championship. He remembered the day with Lucy, and his memory of it was like having an awful thirst for a cold drink of clear cold water or a chocolate soda on a hot day. It had been a windy day in March, without any sun. The air had seemed black, and the sky blacker, and all the sun that day had been in his thoughts of her. He had had all kinds of goofy, dizzy feelings that he liked. They had walked home from school along Indiana Avenue, he and Lucy. They hadn’t spoken much, and they had stopped every little while to look at things. They had stopped at the corner of Sixtieth, and he had shown her the basement windows they had broken, just to get even with old Boushwah, the Hunkie janitor, because he always ran them off the grass when they goofed on their way home from school. And she had pretended that it was awful for guys to break windows; when he could see by the look in her eyes that she didn’t at all think it so terrible. And they had walked on slow, pigeon-toed slow, slower, so that it would take them a long time to go home. He had carried her books, too, and they had talked about this and that, about the skating season that was just finished, and about the spelling match between the fifth- and sixth-grade boys and girls, where both of them had been spelled down at the first crack of the bat, and they had talked about just talk. When they came to the elevated structure near Fifty-ninth, he had shown her where they played shinny with tin cans, and she said it was a dangerous game, and you were liable to get your shins hurt. Then he had shown her where he had climbed up the girder to the top, just below the elevated tracks, and she had shivered because it was such a dangerous brave thing to do, and he had felt all proud, like a hero, or like Bronco Billy or Eddie Polo in the movies. They had walked home lazy, and he had carried her books, and he wished he had the price to buy her candy or a soda, even if it was Lent, and they had stood before the gray brisk twos building where she lived, and he had wanted, as the devil wants souls, to kiss her, and he hadn